How many nurses does it take...?

How many nurses does it take to create a safe staffing environment?

That, of course, depends on a lot of things, which the American Nurses Association tried to answer by asking nurses about their working situations. They conducted an online poll from March 31 to May 12 and got more than 10,000 responses. (Ah, the beauty of the Internet.)

Probably the most glaring response indicates that 73 percent of respondents think that the staffing on their unit or shift is inadequate. My guess is they answered that way because they feel as though they are rushed, aren’t getting everything done, are spreading themselves too thin and/or aren’t able to respond to their patients’ calls in a timely matter.

Here are some other stats from the poll:• Nearly 75 percent of the respondents were staff nurses.• Six out of ten said they knew of someone who had left direct-care nursing because of low staffing levels.• Almost half said they wouldn’t feel comfortable having a loved one being cared for in the facility where they worked.• More than one in three nurses said they rarely or never got a break.

(The entire results of the ANA poll and Safe Staffing Saves Lives project can be seen at www.safestaffingsaveslives.org/WhatisANADoing/PollResults.aspx.)

I can remember days while working on a medical teaching floor when I couldn’t even go to the bathroom, and those often were the days that required overtime. Sometimes it was because all hell had broken loose, but more often, it was that there just weren’t enough bodies to do the work. I went home frustrated and wondered until I clocked in the next morning what I had missed or failed to do.

And even more frustrating, it was always someone who didn’t do patient care that asked why I couldn’t get the work done in the allotted eight hours.

Do you experience any of the same frustrations?

How is staffing at your place of work?

At day’s end, are you satisfied that all your work (and that of others) got done?

Should there be a mandatory nurse-to-patient ratio?

Tell us what you think.